Breathe
By Aribel Contreras
No, let's not get confused. The announcement that two thirds of the vacancies to be opened for the entrance examination to the Mexican Foreign Service (SEM) will be for women does not automatically result in a feminist foreign policy. That it was about time, yes. That it was overdue, too. That they took advantage of the moment to use the month of March to make the announcement, when this month is considered the month of women, perhaps. But from that to affirming that this is a step towards a foreign policy in favor of women is a long way off.
I am very grateful to those who have written to me privately (through different communication channels) to propose me to apply to this call. But my answer in private, I make it public: "I am not interested in applying". I have already demonstrated that, on my own merits, my intellectual capacity, my soft skills and my knowledge of languages, national and international geography, Mexican and world history, economics, national and international law, among a large number of other subjects, I did pass stages one and two for this exam in the summer of 1998. And as I said a couple of years ago in the social network X (formerly Twitter), it was devastating that a misogynist ambassador was a member of the SEM Admission Committee since he denied the opportunity to me, two of my classmates from the Master's Degree in Diplomatic Studies of the Matías Romero Institute (IMR) and who knows how many other women. He told us in the interview that is part of the third stage: "what are you doing here, don't you understand that women are not good for Mexican diplomacy, you are going to get pregnant someday and you will not be of any use to us, go away". Yes, she cut me out of the interview process without having asked me any of the questions she was supposed to ask me in disciplinary terms. This was a profound verbal aggression against me for being a woman. I will never forget how my ears rang when I heard these words, my smiling face blurred, and neither of the other two members of the interview group said anything. On the contrary, their silence was the green light to this outrage because I was a woman. I remember that they were: a very light-skinned, black-haired, round-faced official who wore glasses and whose name was Blanca. The other was a tall ambassador, with light brown hair, and if I remember correctly, his name was Francisco. Both of them were accomplices of this baseness during the entrance process to SEM in 1998.
But the wretch who cut short the possibility of developing a diplomatic career for several women, continued in various embassies and other public positions. He is now retired, but he did a lot of damage. His name? Of course, I put it in capital letters: JORGE ALBERTO LOZOYA LEGORRETA, so that no one forgets it, least of all those who boast of boasting that with this quota of 66 women, "progress" is being made in gender parity in the SEM. May it not be forgotten by those retired ambassadors who dared to defend it in a Whatsapp chat they have and who even dared to question such public denunciation minimizing my experience. May they not forget inside and outside the SEM the way in which several women have had to fight against harassment at work, machismo and misogyny. May it not be forgotten by those who are witnesses of so many arbitrariness towards women whose complaints did not prosper for the simple fact of having a vagina and not a penis.
This terrible fact is not only about me but about all those women who have suffered mistreatment and abuse of any kind and of any rank in the two branches of the SEM. The quotas imposed are sometimes just to make up for gender inequalities. Imposing 66 places may be a mere façade to put in those who, even if they do not have merits, enter, in order to cover the quota and show that there is gender equity. We should not be surprised that in this contest women enter who, although they do not have the necessary credentials, do have the affinity of the "required" political ideology. How many political appointments we see in various embassies and consulates that become an outrage for Mexicans?
Surely there will be those who disagree with these lines that I am writing because they believe that our country is really moving towards a feminist foreign policy through these 66 places. But I answer them in advance, they don't count for me. What I experienced while studying at the IMR should not be minimized, especially if we add (as icing on the cake) that Ambassador Agustín García-López Loaeza never deigned to receive me in his office to give me feedback on my thesis. It was the IMR itself who asked him -in writing with a letter signed by Ambassador Olga Pellicer as general director- to be the reader of my research project to graduate from the master's degree and he never received me to give me comments, observations and/or improvements.
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